First off, I love that you're actively pursuing alternative methods of human preservation. That's awesome, and I hope you manage to find some useful ideas in your search. However, I fear that this approach in particular doesn't really solve the problem that cryoprotectants successfully do (toxicity briefly aside).
without cryoprotectants the water will expand upon freezing, and break the cells.
This line in particular is my biggest point of contention. I am by no means an expert in this field, and my understanding may be moot in this context, but the expansion of water-ice crystals isn't the central concern for frozen biological cells. A quickly found source claims that:
Since ice is essentially pure H2O, ice formation can increase the concentration of minerals in the remaining cytosol to a toxic level. The increased mineral concentration in the cytosol will cause water to be drawn in from the surrounding cells by osmosis, which can cause the cell to swell and burst.
Alcor's official FAQ also says that:
When tissue is slowly cooled, ice first forms between cells. The growing ice crystals increase the concentration of solutes in the remaining liquid around them, causing osmotic dehydration of cells.
Your method doesn't prevent the formation of ice crystals, it merely changes the structure of the crystals, and at what temperature they form, so I suspect harmful cell osmosis can still occur. Of course, I could be insufficiently understanding why ice crystals effect the mineral concentration of cytosol, or the order in which certain biological areas freeze under variable conditions, and your smaller ice/lower freezing temperature would successfully prevent this issue. I don't believe this is necessarily the case, given your explanation, but if anyone who's more studied in these fields could speak up, I'd be happy to defer to their expertise.
The ritual has been completed. I await my karmic reword, as per tradition.
There was a lot of good variance in the calibration questions (for me), so nice job thinking of them! Gur ivqrb tnzr dhrfgvba va cnegvphyne fhecevfrq zr jura V ybbxrq hc gur nafjre, nf rira nf n uhtr Zvarpensg sna V unqa'g ernyvmrq vg orng bhg frpbaq cynpr ol 3 zvyyvba.
Also, in a fit of needless cleverness, I made my public key decryptable (by my private key) into a plaintext message that works as an extra layer of identification in the case that I win the money.
I think ordering/ranking experiences would be more successful (in general) than trying to just give them scores.
An example of such a system: Every ping asks you to briefly describe the previous hour, and then shows you a list of every other ping you've written for the last week/month or so. You then put the description wherever it fits in the list, above everything that was less fun to experience, and below everything that was more fun.
In this way it's very easy to notice happiness trends (whether or not you're getting happier or sadder over time) without worrying about associating the same activity with the same score, even if it's becoming less or more fun to do.
Tsuyoku naritai indeed! I haven't been keeping up with the story since my original binge back when book 2 as still in-progress, and you've really been getting things done, wow. Keep it up!
To start off with something everyone here will be interested in, I've recently and finally finished the first part of my video version of The Useful Idea of Truth (LW post here, Youtube link here). It seems well liked, and I'm even wondering if I should've posted it to Main. To understand what finishing this project means to me may be hard, as it means a lot. I have learned a ton doing this, and am really happy with the final look. My previous video editing experience was basically putting still frames and videos in sequential order with a spoken voice overtop. I'm 18 years old. I'm 18 and inexperienced and I just made something that I consider on par with CGP Grey in production quality, and he's been making videos professionally for years. It's so great to look at one of my idols, say "I bet I could do that too," and then actually do it. There's a real-world benchmark for this skill I've never really done before, and I matched it. I'm developing as a person, learning and training new skills, and it's feeling great. Of course, at >80 hours for that 6 minute video, my production rate isn't so great, given I still have schooling and work to worry about. I'm sure I can optimize, slim down, and otherwise improve my workflow, and I'd love to just jump right into doing this full-time, cranking out LW videos every other week, but I can't. I've got a bit of a pipe dream, of course, that crowd-funding or an official sponsor could keep me going until Youtube add revenue/Subable/Patreon can support me, but I'm not confident there's room in people's budget for something like this work to become a priority for them.
Less of public interest, I have made a lot of progress with my schooling. This last spring I made an arrangement with my High school to do my Senior year somewhat differently than is standard. Thanks to advanced placement classes completed in previous years, I had only 3 credits needed to graduate, so I had the option to just do those 3 courses at my own pace, over the summer. 2 have been completed (yay me, I can self-motivate!) , and all I have left to finish is my English 12 class. 4 days ago, I buckled down and finished the 1st of the 4 papers I need to do. The reading needed for the others is getting done quickly, and I'm happy with what progress I have done already. I look forward finishing High School without having to actually go to school, and the validation of my previous feelings toward self-paced lessons is nice.
That's one of my larger concerns about this format, actually. Only watching one video, out of the context of the others, could be more harmful than good. Even videos that are more independently consumable than this one run into the problem that knowing about biases can hurt people.
However, I think (eventually) having a large bank of videos for viewers to binge on, and including links directly to related LW posts I haven't yet covered is a good enough band-aid to assuage that worry.
I don't really, though I did show the video to a couple people while making it, at different in-progress points, but there was never the specific instruction to look for spelling errors. If there is anyone here interesting in joining such a group for official "proofreading" purposes, comment here or send me a PM. I'll get to organizing a mailing list/subreddit/something to suit the purpose.
Thank you for the feedback! I do plan to make many more, but unfortunately, these videos will easily have 2 or more months between each other, unless I can get the income to support myself working on them near full time. This little project took >80 hours of work.
As of now, I don't plan to go back and fix small errors, like misspellings. It's possible, and I do apreciate you pointing them out where they exist, but it's a lot of trouble to do.
I agree with you. If you pay attention, you'll notice the overall presentation of the text changes dramatically as the video goes forward. This correlates to the lessons I learned in real time while making it, and the earlier video is only like the way it is because I didn't feel like going back and changing things was an important enough of an improvement to warrant the effort.
That's a very sound (pun partially intended) insight, and I don't immediately see a significant reason for why that shouldn't be the case.
However, humans aren't perfectly uniform spheres of water (to borrow from a common physics joke), so some concerns do still exist. Namely: Pressure might propagate through them less predictably/quickly than just water, and different areas of the body might begin freezing at different pressures/in different orders (which can, however, be countered by raising pressures quickly).
I have updated significantly in the direction of "This idea might actually be very valuable to cryonics proponents," for sure.